Legal Commentary: Copyright for software is an interest in a code as a “literary work”, not for its functions. Therefore, although the code that runs a particular machine learning model might be protected by copyright, a reconstruction is unlikely to share the particular expression of code with the original, and thus reconstruction is unlikely to violate copyright law: for instance, even if both the original and the “stolen” model are decision trees as shown in [1]}, their exact implementation may differ and thus the “stolen” model would not infringe copyright.
